Expert Opinion: How UK start-ups are helping the country win the Generative AI race

Kao Data, the IT infrastructure business behind a £350 million 40MW data centre planned for Stockport, believes UK start-ups are helping the country become a leader in the application of Generative AI. The firm’s Business Development Director, Tom Bethell explains:

Generative AI is the new entrepreneurial frontier. Not only is content-generating artificial intelligence the fastest-growing technology of our time, with potential to transform every sector of industry, but it’s also the most talked-about and disruptive new tech since the dawn of the internet. Among investors, everyone wants a piece.

Today’s start-ups are already embracing generative AI in their workflows, and they understand the value of tools like ChatGPT, Bard and Llama for boosting productivity. Indeed, IT that doesn’t deploy generative AI may soon be in the minority. In its May 2023 Data and Analytics Predictions, Gartner predicted that, “By 2027, generative design AI tools will automate 70% of the design effort for new web and mobile apps.”

But while investors are keen for start-ups to deploy generative AI, the new businesses that are really creating excitement in the investor community are the ones developing their own large language models and generative AI products, harnessing the power of today’s ultra-efficient, high-performance data centres to do so.

Investor enthusiasm for generative AI has helped the UK to surge into position as Europe’s AI leader. Europe’s best-funded start-ups of 2023 include Bristol-based Graphcore (which boasts $682 million funding) and London-based Builder.ai ($445m), both of whom develop generative AI models for other organisations to use. Additionally, Oxford-based and world-renowned Exscientia ($374m) is today using generative AI to discover and develop medicine.

A July 2023 study by VC firm Earlybird finds that the UK currently has 334 AI start-ups, with Germany (167) and France (135) some way behind. The success of home-grown AI has even helped push the UK to the top of the 2022 world rankings for private AI investment, beaten only by the US and China, which is a marked step towards the country’s ambitions of becoming an AI and supercomputing power.

Continue reading about the UK’s pioneering start-ups deploying generative AI in fields ranging from cybersecurity to drug development on the Kao Data website.